Music composed by

Piano music David Matthews Musique concrète Ian Fredericks Cello Nathan Waks Piano Anthony Fogg The Music Recording Rex Harding

Peter Sculthorpe is one of 's foremost composers of classical music. Tasmanian born, his first score for a feature film was the low-budget 1962 children's feature They Found A Cave.

He next did the score for Michael Powell's Age of Consent, but there were disagreements about the score he devised, with it being dropped and replaced by a conventional outing from British composer . (It is now available on the restored region 1 DVD 'director's cut' edition. It is a muted piece which Sculthorpe acknowledges was written under the influence of Balinese music, with Dunk island a kind of Bali substitute for him).

According to Sculthorpe, he was busy writing the Sun music ballet score in 1967-68, working with , but he always loved the notion of movies - he'd been aware of Powell since Red Shoes - and found working with Powell incredibly easy.

Disgruntled Columbia executives aside, whom Sculthorpe said found the score "too sophisticated", Sculthorpe would go on to become an elder statesman of the Australian classical music scene, and his work for the movie is a gentle, beguiling and engaging work using instruments that clearly unnerved parochial American executives.

According to 's executive producer Gil Brealey, the experience had so soured Sculthorpe that he had resolve not to write another film score.

It was David Williams, then head of Greater Union distributors, who persuaded Sculthorpe to do the score. Director John Honey confirms this in his memoir of the film being made, which can be found in full here:

I have a particular interest in film music, and Iʼm an amateur cellist. In this slow-paced, highly visual and dialogue-sparse movie, the score would be crucial. I wanted the music to provide a strong spiritual undertone, and to underpin the main characters and narrative strands of the story. I wanted the elements to be simple, spare, and emotionally powerful.

I knew Peter Sculthorpeʼs music reasonably well, and knew he was the composer I wanted to work with on the Manganinnie score. I also knew his experience in screen composition had not been completely happy. In the early 1960s he wrote a charming score for They Found a Cave, beautifully performed by the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. So far so good. But then came Michael Powellʼs Age of Consent (1969), adapted by Peter Yeldham from Norman Lindsayʼs novel. But for the international release, Sculthorpeʼs score was replaced with one written by Stanley Myers. Brealey told me recently that because of the bitter taste left by that incident, only strong persuasion by David Williams, father of Kim and then general manager of Greater Union, our biggest private investor, secured Peterʼs agreement.

In the DVD commentary, director John Honey notes that the film contains two major themes - the cello is used to represent Manganinnie, with the string quartet (the film's budget couldn't afford a larger body of strings) chiming in to represent the Aboriginal people, while represents the European settlers. Honey notes that the contrasts between these two things underlies the whole shape of the score, and the idea and design for this shape was worked out before any shooting got under way.

However as Honey notes here, while editing was relatively plain sailing, there were a few hiccups with Sculthorpe:

Editing was quick and straightforward. There are many long take and one-shot scenes, and I knew what I wanted. Mike Woolveridge was the editor, and his assistant was Posie Jacobs – now Posie Graeme-Evans of McLeodʼs Daughters fame. The initial cut was 112 minutes, and thatʼs the one Peter Sculthorpe and his associate David Matthews saw first and loved.

Peter was initially upset when he saw the 90 minute cut, saying weʼd destroyed it and there was no room for music, but when I went through it with him in detail he immediately understood and delivered his wonderful score. David Matthews contributed the Schubertian piano theme, and Ian Fredericks was responsible for the “musique concrète” sounds using the tribeʼs voices. The score was performed by the Sydney String Quartet, with Nathan Waks playing solo cello and Anthony Fogg piano, recorded in the recording studio. (Peterʼs score won the 1980 AFI award for Best Music Score, the only one of seven Manganinnie nominations to get up. It was the year of Bruce Beresfordʼs Breaker Morant!)

Perhaps the most notable element in the film score came to pass via a tragedy that involved the actress cast to play Manganinnie.

After being cast in the role, Mawuyul Yanthalawuy returned to her Elcho Island/ Arnhem Land home, only to have her son die.

When she returned to to do the film, she gave Honey a cassette tape of the song sung at her son's funeral, telling Honey she was going to using the emotional feeling it generated to help her mourn the death of her fictional husband on screen. Honey had been worried whether she would be able to reach deep in performance terms, but this took the score in an unexpected and unplanned direction, as he explained both in the DVD commentary and here:

Mawayul returned to Hobart in late October, for rehearsals with Anna Ralph. We met at the airport and I put my arms around her, not knowing quite what to say about her sonʼs death. She placed an audiocassette in my hand. I asked her what it was, and she said it was the song that was sung at her sonʼs funeral. She would sing it in the scene at her husbandʼs funeral pyre, and the thought of her sonʼs death would unlock the emotion needed to make the scene convincing. I was humbled by her courage and her total commitment to the role. I never worried again about her ability to give a successful performance.

The funeral song was created and sung by the late Buruminy Dhamarrandji. He was a great song man of Arnhem Land. He plays Manganinnieʼs husband Meenapeekameena in the movie.

I passed the audiocassette on to Peter Sculthorpe. He was captivated by the melody, and it became the Manganinnie motif in his score. He refers to it as “Elcho Island Lament” and has used it many times in subsequent compositions, including the famous Kakadu and Threnody for Solo Cello.

Sculthorpe sub-contracted out to some associates the short burst of electronic music which is based on the voices of the tribe and which Manganinnie hears in her befuddled state. The idea was that Manganinnie would follow the source of these electronically treated voices to a meeting with the young red-haired Joanna - and Manganinnie, as custodian in her tribe of fire, would immediately react on seeing her red hair.

Similarly according to Honey the theme at the end was written by a young English composer, David Matthews, who happened to be working with Sculthorpe at the time. The cello and the piano come together for the first time at the climax to the film - a more symbolic, musical and metaphorical ending than the ending first proposed by author Beth Roberts, who wanted Manganinnie given a decent Christian burial rather than a cremation, followed by a burial in the snow with a white and a black cockatoo featured on her headstone).

It was decided that Joanna would sing Manganinnie's song at the end. This was one of the big changes made to the book, and fearing the fall out, the then head of the Tasmanian Film Corporation co-executive producer on the film, Malcolm Smith, arranged a meeting for Honey to give Roberts the bad news.

According to Honey she wasn't happy at all, but he believed the ending now used is the correct one, and that the ending in the book wouldn't have worked at all. As staged, it does allow the two themes to come together, which no doubt pleased Sculthorpe.

Sculthorpe has his own site here, and there is a wiki here, and he is also present at the Australian Music Centre site here.

(Below: Peter Sculthorpe) (Below: Peter Sculthorpe meeting up with Michael Powell's son Kevin Powell to reminisce about Age of Consent in the extras on the special edition DVD, and below that, Sculthorpe being interviewed) English composer David Matthews, who contributed the piano music to the score, has also had a long career in classical music. At time of writing, he had his own website here, and a wiki here.

(Below: David Matthews) Ian Fredericks, who did the Musique concrète for the film, would go on to be active in exploring the interaction of computers and music. Some of his works are listed at the Australian Music Centre here. He died in 2001 and there is a brief obituary for him at real time, here.